Behind me are two very, very different approaches to the problem of AIDS and portraiture.
And they are different by design.
They have two different publics and they have two different politics.
Over my shoulder is an image by David Wojnarowicz, the great activist artist who, in this instance,
literally found a patch of dry ground, excavated a trench, buried his own face, and shot himself
as if in a grave.
Wojnarowicz, from the beginning of the plague, came to understand his work as shocking us
out of our complacency, exposing the twin defects of homophobia and racism that had
made America over into essentially two different countries: one fully aware of the effects
of the plague and the other one, as if in a bubble, unaware of the mass suffering in
other communities in other places.
Wojnarowicz wanted to aggressively push his perspective.
But the other artist here, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, took a different approach.
Softer, more indirect, not less political but less obviously so.
He wanted his work to be able to circulate like a virus in the museum system.
Making work that bypassed all the censorship and homophobic resistance that followed in
the wake of Jesse Helms and the entire crisis around the representation of gay male sexuality
following the Mapplethorpe exhibition in 1989 at the Corcoran Museum.
That exhibition was finally pulled under pressure from Congress.
And so in 1989, Wojnarowicz and Felix Gonzalez-Torres understood two different political paths.
For Felix, it was more important to get the work into the museum and to speak indirectly
to the issues at hand in offering us, as he does here, a portrait of Ross in L.A., his
partner at his healthy weight at 175 pounds.
Gonzalez-Torres gives us and emblem of the AIDS crisis that works subtly.
When we put that candy in our mouth, we participate in the diminishment, directly and personally,
of his partner.
We also engage in the Catholic ritual of communion.
And we also potentially take contagion into ourselves in an era which cleaved gay from
straight and, even more powerfully, AIDS from non-AIDS.
This is an image that brings us close, brings us into contact, makes us realize that we
are the cause of his partner’s diminishment.
But this picture instead doesn't want to operate in indirect terms.
It wants to scream.
Its keynote is rage and horror.
And that, ironically, even decades after these works were made, still resonates so powerfully
that one of Wojnarowicz’s works was excised from this exhibition following protests making
clear the degree to which his modality, his aggressive in-your-face activist art, can
still offend the powers that be.